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January 13, 2005
iTunes - where is that darn circled arrow?
Apple, a company renowned and famous for exquisite attention to usability and detail, creates many wonderful products, including iTunes, the music jukebox for the ubiquitous iPod *. Even tho i don't have an iPod, i like iTunes, and use it as my primary music player. The iTunes Music Store is also great, being the only place i've purchased digital music online. The iTMS, based on what would seem to be a form of Apple's Safari browser, has a good layout and simple ordering scheme.
However, what i'm getting at here is that for all the good things of the iTMS, why are the artists and album names so difficult to select in the track-display screen? I'm only 25, with no major physical impairments, and already i feel like i need the unwavering hand precision of a neural surgeon just to select a track's artist/album name. Why can one so easily double-click the track (albeit a not so obvious feature) yet have to click on a tiny circled arrow next to an artist or album name? Why can't the names be hyper-linked, like so many other things in the iTMS, providing a much larger area to click on? Come on Apple, i'm sure the coding can't be that hard. Anybody have a good reason for this?
* yay for the new iPod Shuffle! :)
Posted by MaTT at 01:12 PM | Comments (5)
January 06, 2005
Improving on Google
Search engine competition is fierce, i know. Rarely does a week go by without somebody talking about Google, the 800-pound gorilla of searching. Even more rarely does a moment pass without someone mentioning 'Google' in the same phrase as 'search'. With Google working so well, it's no wonder that so many people use it, and that all the other major search engines (Yahoo, MSN, Dogpile, A9, you name it...) are trying to catch up. Nearly all the search engines' results pages even look the same, save for A9's ingenious addition of images, movies, etc. on the same page (if you like).
So, ever wonder how even Google can do better? Enter my dad, a mid-fifties design engineer who never stops thinking :) Thus i attribute this suggestion to him, because as we Si'ers know, ordinary computer users are often the best source of new ideas.
You know those one or two lines of text that search engines include to give you a hint of what the page is about? The keyword(s) you typed appear in this mini-block of text, giving you a 'hint' of what you'd get if you clicked on the link. The idea? Make the text longer.
Why? Those one or two lines of text are called 'information scent' -- a term mentioned by usability experts such as Jakob Nielsen and originally part of information foraging theory by Pirolli and Card (PDF), written when they were at Xerox PARC. One would surmise that more of a scent would contribute to more knowledge of what was behind the link, up to a certain point where people would rather click on the link than read the long block of text. But where is this breaking point? Have the Google people done any research on this?
There are a number of ways to implement this, even if Google didn't want to make it a default setting, including the text-block expanding when you rollover the search result, or when you click on a plus sign button. It could also even be a preference setting, where a user could select whether he wants 1, 2, 5, 10, etc. lines of text.
So, there's an idea. Maybe somebody will see this and suggest it. In any case, i hope it gets people thinking, that things can always get better. Google knows this, and that's why they're doing so well. But they can get better too.
Posted by MaTT at 01:13 AM | Comments (3)